Peter Watson

THE GREAT DIVIDE

History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
Watson describes his subject as the greatest natural experiment in
history. Humans entered America after the Last Ice Age, about 15000
years ago, crossing by means of a land bridge across what is now the
Bering Strait. When sea levels rose following the melting of the ice the
New World immigrants were cut off, and civilisation in the two
hemispheres subsequently developed very differently. In this book Watson
describes how and why these differences occurred and what effects they
had on the ways people thought and lived.
To some extent this book covers the same ground as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, though Watson is more
concerned than Diamond with the religious differences between America
and Eurasia.

Religion in Middle and South America was strongly influenced by two
factors. One was the precariousness of life in this region, resulting
partly from numerous active volcanoes, which erupted at unpredictable
intervals causing destruction and loss of life, and partly from climatic
variability due to El Niño, which caused both floods and droughts.

The other important factor influencing religious ideas was the
availability of a wide variety of hallucinogens, far more than existed
in the Old World. Even maize, it seems, was originally cultivated, not
for food but for making beer. The original immigrants into the New World
came from Asia and would have had a strong shamanic tradition, which
never died out and which was enhanced by the availability of
hallucinogens.

The civilisations of Middle and South America are notorious for their
addiction to bloody human sacrifice. As Watson makes clear, this feature
was on a large scale and even more bloody than is often realised. The
reason, he believes, is that the peoples of this region felt it
necessary to appease the gods who were responsible for eruptions,
floods, and droughts. The only way to do this was human sacrifice,
sometimes of children. Wars were fought, not usually for territorial
gain, or at least not primarily for that, but to acquire victims for
sacrifice. The ball games that were played widely in the region also
often ended in sacrifice, usually of the losers but sometimes even of
the victors.

The book has three parts. Part 1 describes how the Americas came to be
populated at the end of the last Ice Age. Part 2 is about the differences
in nature between the two worlds: animals, plants, and especially
narcotics. Part 3 is more historical and describes key cultural
developments in the two worlds.

In the Old World, a hunter-gatherer existence was replaced by
agriculture and the beginnings of urban life. Nomadism and the herding
of animals also developed and this eventually led to large-scale warfare
between steppes-dwellers and cities. Warfare was facilitated by the use
of bronze and subsequently iron to make weapons. Also crucial was the
introduction of the chariot, replaced later by even more effective
mounted warriors after the invention of the bit and stirrups.

Another effect of the movement to animal herding, Watson suggests, may
have been the first recognition of the connection between sex and
conception. This, to us, obvious biological fact may not have been
apparent before the domestication of animals, especially dogs, with
their short gestation period. Intuitively, this seems unlikely, but it
is true that it has sometimes been asserted by anthropologists even in
relation to isolated modern societies.

In the New World there was no bronze or iron, although of course gold
was widely used culturally, as the Spaniards discovered when they
arrived. Urban civilisations arose a number of times in Middle and South
America—
the story is now known to go considerably further back than
was recognised until recently. As noted already, they were characterised
by persisting human sacrifice, which had largely died out in the Old
World by this time.

There was a continuing obsession with jaguars, which were linked with
hallucinogens and altered states of consciousness. Rulers claimed to be
descended from jaguars and there are images of humans being partly
transformed into jaguars, which Watson regards as reflecting continuing
shamanistic beliefs. The fixation on skeletons and on flaying sacrifical
victims may also have shamanic roots, since shamans believed that they
underwent ordeals of this kind in other worlds during their training.

This is a long and rich book—
perhaps too long. Watson has read very
widely and one gets the feeling that he wants to give us everything he
has discovered. At times the parade of facts becomes overwhelming; the
reader (this reader, anyway) starts to wilt under the sheer weight of
information. Conversely, the summary of Old World history in Part 3,
taking in the invention of monotheism, money, Greek democracy and
science, and even Chinese history, feels inevitably rather thin.

The main value of this book, for me at any rate, is less in its central
thesis than in the sheer strangeness of many of the facts it recounts.
It is based on an up-to-date review of recent research on South and
Meso-American civilisations and the detailed chapter references provide
plenty of suggestions for further reading, some of which I'm already
following up.

An appendix contains a rather amusing summary of changing views of the
New World that have been expressed by Old World writers since the
arrival of Columbus in 1492. It's a pity that there is relatively little
information available on the other side—
what did the denizens of
Middle and South America think about their conquerors?

17 October 2012

%T The Great Divide
%S History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New
%A Watson, Peter
%I Weidenfeld and Nicolson
%C London
%D 2012
%G ISBN-13 9780297845584
%P xxviii+610pp
%K ethnography
%O ten maps